


Tyzias: Find Happiness in her Arms

by AltUniverseWash



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Adult Trolls (Homestuck), Alternia, Alternian Empire, Ascension, Chance Meetings, Contains an abridged copy that omits the sexual content, Delightful Abattoir cinematic universe, F/F, Implied Sexual Content, Legislacerators, Lesbian Character, Non-Explicit Sex, POV Lesbian Character, POV Second Person, Post-Ascension, Prequel, Reunion Sex, Reunions, Star-crossed, Suggestive Themes, Sweet, Trolls, Trolls (Homestuck)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:07:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29434338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AltUniverseWash/pseuds/AltUniverseWash
Summary: Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and right before your tenth sweep you were recruited into the Alternian Legiscorpus to begin training as a Legislacerator. That was the last time you saw your matesprit.It's been nearly a sweep since then, and today is a day like any other.
Relationships: Tyzias Entykk/Stelsa Sezyat
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. Unabridged Version

**Author's Note:**

> CW: This fic contains heavily implied sexual content, but nothing explicit. However, if sexual themes make you uncomfortable then proceed with caution.  
> The second chapter is an abridged version that omits the one scene that's particularly suggestive and changes a couple other bits.
> 
> If you enjoy this story, please read "A Delightful Abattoir" and its sequel "An Unkind Sanctuary" which are set in this universe.

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you’ve come to realize lately that sometimes you just… drift away from people. “People” in this case being a thinly-veiled euphemism for “your matesprit” and “drift away” being more like “are forcibly separated due to your recruitment into the Legiscorpus training program.” You’ve never been quite as good at wordplay as she is… she _was?_ It’s been a sweep already and sometimes you wonder if maybe she likes different things now — maybe she’s changed since you were both nine sweeps and thought that maybe… just _maybe_ there was a way out of this.

You wake up with these thoughts taking up most of the space inside of your head. The rest of the space is mostly devoted to how your mouth tastes like stale ash and the cycle-old coffee that you drank a half-pot of last night in a desperate attempt to stay awake studying for the exam tonight. You’ve become a big fan of coffee lately, even if it wasn’t something you ever really had a taste for before you went into orbit. Fortunately, one of the few things that the Legiscorpus flagship (a behemoth known as the Iustitia which is a name, you think, far too pretty for such an ugly place) has in abundance is horrible coffee.

As a trainee, you don’t rate a recupercoon yet, so you roll off the thin foam mattress you were tossing around on all night, just barely managing to twist so that you land on your feet instead of your ass. You’re standing now… and it doesn’t feel much better to be standing up than it did to be lying down. You’re still sore, and you’re still tired, and that taste in your mouth hasn’t gotten any better.

And she’s still taking up most of that space in your mind. Stelsa Sezyat — the one that got away.

“Got away” in this case being a thinly-veiled euphemism for “was taken from you when you were both forced into training to support a brutal, Imperialist regime.”

Sighing heavily to yourself, you stumble out of your quarters and toward the communal ablution block to wash up and try to scrub the taste of regret and stale coffee out of your mouth.

* * *

An hour later, you’ve managed to do several things on your list, including — but not limited to —

1) Waking up.   
2) Brushing your teeth.   
3) Eating food.   
4) Getting more coffee.   
5) _Not_ screaming until your throat is raw at the sheer frustration of the mundane hell that your everyday life has become.

You are, in fact, rightfully proud of how well you’ve managed to do so far this cycle. If your good fortune continues apace, you’ll probably even do well enough on your Fundamentals of Bureaucratic Procedure exam to avoid summary dismissal from the program and re-assignment to an Army posting that involves considerably less boredom and considerably more dying-before-the-age-of-twelve. This is, as you are so fond of saying, a less-than-ideal outcome, and it is one you would prefer to avoid.

On your way to the exam room, still with another hour to go, you run (almost literally) into another one of the people you knew from the latter days of your life on-planet. This is, unfortunately, not someone who you lost touch with. In fact, this is someone who went offworld slightly before you that you never thought you’d see again… until you started training in the Legiscorpus only to realize that he was a senior student in the same program as you.

His name is Tagora Gorjek, and you usually just wish he wouldn’t talk to you.

“Oh, hello there, Tyzias,” he says in the same oily, grating voice that you’ve come to associate primarily with mockery of you and your progress through your training. “Off to fail your exam, I see. You’re _that_ committed to switching careers to Fleet support, hmmm? I mean… it’s a noble goal. All those load gapers aren’t going to scrub themselves.”

You roll your eyes — Tagora isn’t enough of your senior that you can’t treat him with a certain measure of derision. “Shut up, Sore-Gor. I’m doing fine.”

He nods his head and makes a little _“tch-tch”_ noise with his tongue that makes you kind of want to punch him. “Oh, of course. _Perfectly Adequate Entykk_ — that’s what I’ve always called you.” You’re more than aware that this is, of course, completely hoofbeast shit. Tagora doesn’t have the spare space in his pan to give you any kind of nickname, somewhat-clever or otherwise. He does, however, have an almost-infinite capacity for being something of a jackass.

“Look, I’m gonna be late if I stop to talk to you and I’m not in the mood to do this in the first place,” you say quickly, letting the frustration and traces of anger drip into your voice. “So you can fuck off, okay? Is that a thing you know how to do? To fuck off?”

Tagora’s voice is full of the same rough sarcasm as always. “Fine. Go do your exam. Another sweep and I’ll be basically done with my training and then you’ll have to do what I say anyway.” He grinned that same self-satisfied smile as always and walked away.

You’re left with a sour feeling in your stomach — not necessarily because talking to Tagora is _that_ unpleasant (although it is definitely unpleasant), but because it puts a fine point on what your life has become now… and it’s become something that you hate.

* * *

It has been another three hours, and you’ve managed to finish your Fundamentals exam with the general sense that you passed. There were certainly questions that gave you some trouble — questions that were absolutely intended to be as vague and confusing as possible in order to weed out students who had less drive and ambition and might be more suited to simpler roles… like scrubbing gapers or dying in a mud-filled trench on a forgotten border world that no one had even bothered to name.

But, at least for now, you’ve got the sense that you’re safe. Maybe not “safe” in the overall sense of the word, but at the very least in the sense that you probably didn’t fail this specific exam.

You walk out of the exam room with the knowledge that you have most of the rest of the night to yourself, and you fully intend to spend that time studying and consuming as much coffee as you can before your blood pusher starts to feel jittery. This is, you tell yourself unconvincingly, an excellent plan that has absolutely no downsides whatsoever. It is, in fact, a pretty good plan. Or, at the very least, it is _a_ plan, and it’ll occupy you for a while. As long as you’re occupied, the thoughts generally don’t creep in too much.

Not until you fall asleep, anyway.

With your feelings taking a distinct turn toward the melancholy, you turn down the corridor and walk toward the mess hall used by the Legiscorpus students. The corridor is one on the edge of the ship, and out of the thick viewports you can see the blue-brown swell of your home planet, Alternia. The Iustitia is large enough to have a fully-functional gravity generator, so sometimes you forget that you’re actually in orbit. You stop to look out the viewport, feeling something inside tugging at your guts. Alternia wasn’t a good place to live, but it was the only place to live that you ever knew… and you find that you actually miss being down there.

In particular, you miss the feeling of faint hope that you once had. The feeling that you’d had inside when you found the old book on the Signless’ rebellion. A book heavily couched in language that was friendly to the Empire… but you could read between the lines. You’d never told Stelsa about what was in the book — never told anyone about what was in the book… but there was a time when you thought that maybe there was another way forward. A way that didn’t involve the Empire.

And then the drones had come for you, and those hopes had been destroyed along with your lusus, your matespritship, and any hope for the future that involved anything more than a vague attempt to make things as livable as possible from within the procedural nightmare that is the Legiscorpus.

You hate having these thoughts, and you hate the way that they pull at your insides until you feel like doubling over and crying from the sheer frustration of it all. You hate living like this, and you wish every day that things could be different. But you’re also a realist, and you know that there’s very little you can do about the situation you’re in. You suppose you could always just walk out of an airlock, or try to steal a gun from one of the olive blood security, and that would at least end all of this.

But you don’t _want_ to die — you want things to be _better._

With a small groan, you turn to continue on your way to the mess hall, where you’ll drink more terrible coffee and shovel the requisite daily intake of calories into your mouth. And then you’ll—

You stop.

Ahead, just around the corner of the next corridor, you hear someone laughing. More specifically, you hear a distinctive, nasal laugh that carries far more than it has any right to.

You stop, and you listen.

The laugh continues for five beats… and then the person laughing snorts quickly twice and the laugh muffles, as if the person doing the laughing has suddenly clapped her hands to her mouth in embarrassment.

You haven’t heard that laugh for almost a sweep. Not since you heard it every single evening that you woke up…

Not since you and Stelsa Sezyat were living together.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you round the next corner at a half-run and stop, your mind almost refusing to believe that what your eyes are processing is actually real.

Standing with a pair of other teal bloods is Stelsa Sezyat, and she’s laughing about something. The same laugh you remember finding so charming when you were together — the same silly way that it inevitably dissolves into snorting, and then she would get self-conscious and put her hands over her mouth as if that would do anything to stifle the laughter. And her eyes crinkle up just a little bit, and her fangs poke out from her upper lip.

It was, if you’re being honest, one of the cutest things you’d ever seen in your life. And now, here in the corridors of the flagship for the entire Legiscorpus-in-orbit, you’re hearing that laugh again. You’re seeing the way her eyes light up and the way she half-covers her mouth when she gets embarrassed.

You think that you’re able to maintain that sense of unreality right up until the moment that she notices you standing there.

She looks up and her eyes change. All of a sudden, they’re glistening in the glare of the too-bright overhead lights. She’s looking right at you, and the laugh has died away and she’s silent. Slowly, she motions for her two friends to go on without her as she takes two steps forward, toward you. Her mouth is hanging open, showing those cute top-fangs.

“Zizi?” Her voice is quiet — hardly above a whisper. “Zizi… is that… you?”

You want to say something appropriate — something that shows her just how you’ve been feeling over the last sweep. You want to tell her that you missed her more than anything — that you keep waking up from dreams where you’re still together. That every single cycle you regret not simply running from the Empire — because even if that would be an eventual death sentence, at least you wouldn’t have to face the idea of the rest of a life spent without the person who you opened yourself up to.

You want to tell her that you don’t just feel the Empire-approved pity-for-one’s-matesprit for her, but that you think you actually _love_ her in a way that you’re not supposed to feel for anyone. That you would, without question, give up your own life for this woman.

But you don’t say any of this. Instead, you open your own mouth, dust off your vocal cords, and mutter—

“Yep.”

It doesn’t matter. She crosses the distance between the two of you in a second and you feel her wrapping her arms around you, pressing herself to you… and kissing you. She kisses you on the cheek, then the neck, and then — when you’re finally able to process what’s happening — you meet her affection and kiss her on the lips. You close your eyes and let that feeling seep into you — the soft sensation of skin that you haven’t touched for a sweep. The way that the tip of her tongue darts from a parted mouth and touches your bottom lip. The feeling of warmth that rushes over your body.

She pulls back and stares at you, and she’s crying. Tears stream down her cheeks and her lip quivers. You’re pretty sure that you’re crying too, but you’re so overwhelmed by emotion that you can’t even tell.

“Zizi… I… I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again!” Her voice shakes and warbles and cracks as she says it. She looks in your eyes, and you’ve completely forgotten about going to the mess hall or literally anything else. “I thought you were… I don’t know what I thought!”

“Stels, I…”

You still don’t know what to say exactly.

So you ask her if she wants to come back to your room.

And, of course, she says yes.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you’re sitting on your thin foam mattress next to the woman that you never thought you’d see again. Stelsa looks over at you, a teal flush spreading across her cheeks, and she smiles.

“I thought we’d end up assigned to completely different places,” she says quietly. And you can’t blame her for thinking that, because it’s the same thing you thought. “Actually, I wasn’t even stationed here. I ended up over on the Green Moon and they wanted me to go into Fleet Intelligence.”

“How’d you end up here then?” you ask incredulously. You’re still not entirely convinced that this isn’t some kind of waking dream that you’ll eventually come out of.

Stelsa shrugs and smiles. “Attention to detail. The Commander said that I had a natural eye for the kind of details that they needed in the Auditerrorizers, so they transferred me to the Iustitia a couple cycles ago.”

You can’t believe this — for two cycles you’ve been walking around the same corridors as your matesprit and not even realizing it. There’s so much that you want to say to her — so much that you want to tell her about what’s been happening. So much that you want to ask her. It feels like it’s been a small lifetime apart from each other, and you want nothing more than to catch up on everything.

Except that’s a bit of a lie. There’s one thing that you want more. You lean over, and you kiss her again. Except this time, it isn’t the product of sudden, shocked surprise but the result of a sweep of desperate longing. You kiss her slowly this time — gently pulling her bottom lip between yours and sucking — and you hear a noise that sounds an awful lot like a moan escape her lips. Scooting closer to her on the mattress, you wrap your arms around her and pull her in — the feeling of warmth from her body is something you don’t realize how badly you missed until it’s there again. You know why you haven’t been able to sleep much the last sweep.

When you break the kiss, you’re still holding her — your faces are close and you can see the teal flush on her cheeks. You can hear the soft panting as she gasps for breath, her lips parted and a look on her face that you don’t think you’ve ever seen before.

“I missed you,” she says quietly. It isn’t the words she uses — it’s _how_ she uses them.

Five seconds later, she’s in your lap.

* * *

Stelsa Sezyat is sitting in your lap and she’s not wearing a shirt anymore. This isn’t something that you expected when you woke up at the beginning of the cycle, but it’s something that you’ll gladly take. She quickly runs down your shirt from top-to-bottom, slipping the buttons loose and gradually exposing more and more of your bare skin to the too-chilly air of the room.

When she’s done, she slides your shirt back over your shoulders and lets it fall back, and you feel the light brush of the fabric as it slides down your back and lands on the mattress. You suddenly feel _very_ exposed, both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word.

But then Stelsa wraps her arms around your shoulders and pulls you in, pressing bare skin to bare skin. The feeling of warmth overwhelms you, and you let out a moaning sigh against her neck.

“I missed you.” That’s all you can say right now — there’s so much more that you _want_ to say, and so much more than you probably _need_ to say… but for now, you don’t think you even have the words. You reach around Stelsa’s waist and squeeze, holding her close to your body — stomach pressed to stomach, chest to chest. You tilt your head and you kiss her neck.

_She tastes the way I remember_ is the first thought that crosses your mind, and that sets your entire face ablaze with the various implications. You remember the very first time that the two of you were together — just nine sweeps and completely unsure of what to do. But you’d started kissing her on the neck, and you’d just kept moving down… eventually ending up doing something where the word “kissing” didn’t quite apply anymore. But it had felt good, and she’d enjoyed it, and then she’d repaid the favor in kind.

The warm press of her neck against your lips brings back so many memories, and you can feel your blood pusher racing. There’s _so much_ you want to do with Stelsa, but right now all you can do is grip onto her waist and kiss her neck and hope that you’ll never be separated from her again.

“Zizi…” The way she says your name brings back memories too. Memories of lying on top of her and looking into her eyes. Memories of the way that it felt the first time… the second time… the twentieth time… the last time. Those were memories you tried not to dwell on lately — not because they were unpleasant, but because they reminded you that you were never going to see the woman you loved again.

The woman you love, who’s now whispering in your ear. She’s whispering something that you haven’t heard in almost a sweep, and hearing it sets your pusher to racing.

“Stelsa…” Somehow, you think, you’re able to convey all of the love and the lust and the sheer _wanting_ into that name.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you don’t remember a time before you were in love with Stelsa Sezyat.

The two of you are sprawled out on the mattress now, completely naked and covered in the flimsy Empire-issued blanket that you have… and for the first time in nearly a sweep, you feel warm and happy. You’ve come to realize that maybe your life isn’t going to be the unending slog of pain that you thought it would be when you woke up this cycle. You aren’t going to go so far as to say that your life is defined by this woman, but having her in it certainly feels a lot better than not.

You drift towards sleeping with these thoughts taking up most of the space inside your head. The rest of the space is mostly devoted to how your mouth tastes like something distinctly different from — and distinctly more pleasant than — stale ash and cycle-old coffee. You feel drained, but in a way that’s pleasant rather than painful. Mostly, you just want to stay here for a long time and bask in this.

“You don’t have to go away again, do you?” you asked quietly — you feel Stelsa squeeze you as soon as the words leave your mouth.

“No. I’ll be in the Auditerrorizers when I’m done with this. Stationed here, most likely.”

“Good,” you mutter. You realize that if you play your cards right, you’ll be training and eventually permanently stationed on the Iustitia. You will, if you’re smart, see Stelsa Sezyat every single cycle. You can, as a matter of fact, share this very bed with her as long and as often as you want.

When you’re being really honest with yourself, you don’t think you’ll ever be able to change this system… either from the inside or the outside. It’s a thing so vast and so monstrous that the idea that any one person could ever destroy it is laughable. But maybe you don’t have to.

Maybe, if you’re smart, you can be there for this one person inside of that system with you. You can make life better for her — you can make sure that she stays safe. You can’t help everyone… but maybe you can help _one_ person.

Stelsa rests her head on your chest with her eyes closed.

“Zizi…” she mutters quietly. “I love you.”

This is the first time she’s said it. You’re not even sure she’s fully aware of it — fully aware of the implications of it. But you’re quite sure that she means it. You smile, and you scrunch your neck to kiss her on the top of the head, right between the horns.

“I love you too, Stels.”

Your name is Tyzias Entykk. And here, in the arms of the woman you love, you finally drift off into a deep and pleasant sleep.


	2. Abridged Version (definitely safe-for-work version)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and right before your tenth sweep you were recruited into the Alternian Legiscorpus to begin training as a Legislacerator. That was the last time you saw your matesprit.
> 
> It's been nearly a sweep since then, and today is a day like any other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a slightly abridge version of the first chapter that omits some of the more suggestive bits. It's the equivalent of a T-rated fic.

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you’ve come to realize lately that sometimes you just… drift away from people. “People” in this case being a thinly-veiled euphemism for “your matesprit” and “drift away” being more like “are forcibly separated due to your recruitment into the Legiscorpus training program.” You’ve never been quite as good at wordplay as she is… she _was?_ It’s been a sweep already and sometimes you wonder if maybe she likes different things now — maybe she’s changed since you were both nine and thought that maybe… just _maybe_ there was a way out of this.

You wake up with these thoughts taking up most of the space inside of your head. The rest of the space is mostly devoted to how your mouth tastes like stale ash and the day-old coffee that you drank a half-pot of last night in a desperate attempt to stay awake studying for the exam today. You’ve become a big fan of coffee lately, even if it wasn’t something you ever really had a taste for before you went into orbit. Fortunately, one of the few things that the Legiscorpus flagship (a behemoth known as the Iustitia which is a name, you think, far too pretty for such an ugly place) has in abundance is horrible coffee.

As a trainee, you don’t rate a recupercoon yet, so you roll off the thin foam mattress you were tossing around on all night, just barely managing to twist so that you land on your feet instead of your ass. You’re standing now… and it doesn’t feel much better to be standing up than it did to be lying down. You’re still sore, and you’re still tired, and that taste in your mouth hasn’t gotten any better.

And she’s still taking up most of that space in your mind. Stelsa Sezyat — the one that got away.

“Got away” in this case being a thinly-veiled euphemism for “was taken from you when you were both forced into training to support a brutal, Imperialist regime.”

Sighing heavily to yourself, you stumble out of your quarters and toward the communal ablution block to wash up and try to scrub the taste of regret and stale coffee out of your mouth.

* * *

An hour later, you’ve managed to do several things on your list, including — but not limited to —

1) Waking up.   
2) Brushing your teeth.   
3) Eating food.   
4) Getting more coffee.   
5) _Not_ screaming until your throat is raw at the sheer frustration of the mundane hell that your everyday life has become.

You are, in fact, rightfully proud of how well you’ve managed to do so far this cycle. If your good fortune continues apace, you’ll probably even do well enough on your Fundamentals of Bureaucratic Procedure exam to avoid summary dismissal from the program and re-assignment to an Army posting that involves considerably less boredom and considerably more dying-before-the-age-of-twelve. This is, as you are so fond of saying, a less-than-ideal outcome, and it is one you would prefer to avoid.

On your way to the exam room, still with another hour to go, you run (almost literally) into another one of the people you knew from the latter days of your life on-planet. This is, unfortunately, not someone who you lost touch with. In fact, this is someone who went offworld slightly before you that you never thought you’d see again… until you started training in the Legiscorpus only to realize that he was a senior student in the same program as you.

His name is Tagora Gorjek, and you usually just wish he wouldn’t talk to you.

“Oh, hello there, Tyzias,” he says in the same oily, grating voice that you’ve come to associate primarily with mockery of you and your progress through your training. “Off to fail your exam, I see. You’re _that_ committed to switching careers to Fleet support, hmmm? I mean… it’s a noble goal. All those load gapers aren’t going to scrub themselves.”

You roll your eyes — Tagora isn’t enough of your senior that you can’t treat him with a certain measure of derision. “Shut up, Sore-Gor. I’m doing fine.”

He nods his head and makes a little _“tch-tch”_ noise with his tongue that makes you kind of want to punch him. “Oh, of course. _Perfectly Adequate Entykk_ — that’s what I’ve always called you.” You’re more than aware that this is, of course, completely hoofbeast shit. Tagora doesn’t have the spare space in his pan to give you any kind of nickname, somewhat-clever or otherwise. He does, however, have an almost-infinite capacity for being something of a jackass.

“Look, I’m gonna be late if I stop to talk to you and I’m not in the mood to do this in the first place,” you say quickly, letting the frustration and traces of anger drip into your voice. “So you can fuck off, okay? Is that a thing you know how to do? To fuck off?”

Tagora’s voice is full of the same rough sarcasm as always. “Fine. Go do your exam. Another sweep and I’ll be basically done with my training and then you’ll have to do what I say anyway.” He grinned that same self-satisfied smile as always and walked away.

You’re left with a sour feeling in your stomach — not necessarily because talking to Tagora is _that_ unpleasant (although it is definitely unpleasant), but because it puts a fine point on what your life has become now… and it’s become something that you hate.

* * *

It has been another three hours, and you’ve managed to finish your Fundamentals exam with the general sense that you passed. There were certainly questions that gave you some trouble — questions that were absolutely intended to be as vague and confusing as possible in order to weed out students who had less drive and ambition and might be more suited to simpler roles… like scrubbing gapers or dying in a mud-filled trench on a forgotten border world that no one had even bothered to name.

But, at least for now, you’ve got the sense that you’re safe. Maybe not “safe” in the overall sense of the word, but at the very least in the sense that you probably didn’t fail this specific exam.

You walk out of the exam room with the knowledge that you have most of the rest of the day to yourself, and you fully intend to spend that time studying and consuming as much coffee as you can before your blood pusher starts to feel jittery. This is, you tell yourself unconvincingly, an excellent plan that has absolutely no downsides whatsoever. It is, in fact, a pretty good plan. Or, at the very least, it is _a_ plan, and it’ll occupy you for a while. As long as you’re occupied, the thoughts generally don’t creep in too much.

Not until you fall asleep, anyway.

With your feelings taking a distinct turn toward the melancholy, you turn down the corridor and walk toward the mess hall used by the Legiscorpus students. The corridor is one on the edge of the ship, and out of the thick viewports you can see the blue-brown swell of your home planet, Alternia. The Iustitia is large enough to have a fully-functional gravity generator, so sometimes you forget that you’re actually in orbit. You stop to look out the viewport, feeling something inside tugging at your guts. Alternia wasn’t a good place to live, but it was the only place to live that you ever knew… and you find that you actually miss being down there.

In particular, you miss the feeling of faint hope that you once had. The feeling that you’d had inside when you found the old book on the Signless’ rebellion. A book heavily couched in language that was friendly to the Empire… but you could read between the lines. You’d never told Stelsa about what was in the book — never told anyone about what was in the book… but there was a time when you thought that maybe there was another way forward. A way that didn’t involve the Empire.

And then the drones had come for you, and those hopes had been destroyed along with your lusus, your matespritship, and any hope for the future that involved anything more than a vague attempt to make things as livable as possible from within the procedural nightmare that is the Legiscorpus.

You hate having these thoughts, and you hate the way that they pull at your insides until you feel like doubling over and crying from the sheer frustration of it all. You hate living like this, and you wish every day that things could be different. But you’re also a realist, and you know that there’s very little you can do about the situation you’re in. You suppose you could always just walk out of an airlock, or try to steal a gun from one of the olive blood security, and that would at least end all of this.

But you don’t _want_ to die — you want things to be _better._

With a small groan, you turn to continue on your way to the mess hall, where you’ll drink more terrible coffee and shovel the requisite daily intake of calories into your mouth. And then you’ll—

You stop.

Ahead, just around the corner of the next corridor, you hear someone laughing. More specifically, you hear a distinctive, nasal laugh that carries far more than it has any right to.

You stop, and you listen.

The laugh continues for five beats… and then the person laughing snorts quickly twice and the laugh muffles, as if the person doing the laughing has suddenly clapped her hands to her mouth in embarrassment.

You haven’t heard that laugh for almost a sweep. Not since you heard it every single day that you woke up…

Not since you and Stelsa Sezyat were living together.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you round the next corner at a half-run and stop, your mind almost refusing to believe that what your eyes are processing is actually real.

Standing with a pair of other teal bloods is Stelsa Sezyat, and she’s laughing about something. The same laugh you remember finding so charming when you were together — the same silly way that it inevitably dissolves into snorting, and then she would get self-conscious and put her hands over her mouth as if that would do anything to stifle the laughter. And her eyes crinkle up just a little bit, and her fangs poke out from her upper lip.

It was, if you’re being honest, one of the cutest things you’d ever seen in your life. And now, here in the corridors of the flagship for the entire Legiscorpus-in-orbit, you’re hearing that laugh again. You’re seeing the way her eyes light up and the way she half-covers her mouth when she gets embarrassed.

You think that you’re able to maintain that sense of unreality right up until the moment that she notices you standing there.

She looks up and her eyes change. All of a sudden, they’re glistening in the glare of the too-bright overhead lights. She’s looking right at you, and the laugh has died away and she’s silent. Slowly, she motions for her two friends to go on without her as she takes two steps forward, toward you. Her mouth is hanging open, showing those cute top-fangs.

“Zizi?” Her voice is quiet — hardly above a whisper. “Zizi… is that… you?”

You want to say something appropriate — something that shows her just how you’ve been feeling over the last sweep. You want to tell her that you missed her more than anything — that you keep waking up from dreams where you’re still together. That every single day you regret not simply running from the Empire — because even if that would be an eventual death sentence, at least you wouldn’t have to face the idea of the rest of a life spent without the person who you opened yourself up to.

You want to tell her that you don’t just feel the Empire-approved pity-for-one’s-matesprit for her, but that you think you actually _love_ her in a way that you’re not supposed to feel for anyone. That you would, without question, give up your own life for this woman.

But you don’t say any of this. Instead, you open your own mouth, dust off your vocal cords, and mutter—

“Yep.”

It doesn’t matter. She crosses the distance between the two of you in a second and you feel her wrapping her arms around you, pressing herself to you… and kissing you. She kisses you on the cheek, then the neck, and then — when you’re finally able to process what’s happening — you meet her affection and kiss her on the lips. You close your eyes and let that feeling seep into you — the soft sensation of skin that you haven’t touched for a sweep. The way that the tip of her tongue darts from a parted mouth and touches your bottom lip. The feeling of warmth that rushes over your body.

She pulls back and stares at you, and she’s crying. Tears stream down her cheeks and her lip quivers. You’re pretty sure that you’re crying too, but you’re so overwhelmed by emotion that you can’t even tell.

“Zizi… I… I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again!” Her voice shakes and warbles and cracks as she says it. She looks in your eyes, and you’ve completely forgotten about going to the mess hall or literally anything else. “I thought you were… I don’t know what I thought!”

“Stels, I…”

You still don’t know what to say exactly.

So you ask her if she wants to come back to your room.

And, of course, she says yes.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you’re sitting on your thin foam mattress next to the woman that you never thought you’d see again. Stelsa looks over at you, a teal flush spreading across her cheeks, and she smiles.

“I thought we’d end up assigned to completely different places,” she says quietly. And you can’t blame her for thinking that, because it’s the same thing you thought. “Actually, I wasn’t even stationed here. I ended up over on the Green Moon and they wanted me to go into Fleet Intelligence.”

“How’d you end up here then?” you asked incredulously. You’re still not entirely convinced that this isn’t some kind of waking dream that you’ll eventually come out of.

Stelsa shrugs and smiles. “Attention to detail. The Commander said that I had a natural eye for the kind of details that they needed in the Auditerrorizers, so they transferred me to the Iustitia a couple cycles ago.”

You can’t believe this — for two cycles you’ve been walking around the same corridors as your matesprit and not even realizing it. There’s so much that you want to say to her — so much that you want to tell her about what’s been happening. So much that you want to ask her. It feels like it’s been a small lifetime apart from each other, and you want nothing more than to catch up on everything.

Except that’s a bit of a lie. There’s one thing that you want more. You lean over, and you kiss her again. Except this time, it isn’t the product of sudden, shocked surprise but the result of a sweep of desperate longing. Scooting closer to her on the mattress, you wrap your arms around her and pull her in — the feeling of warmth from her body is something you don’t realize how badly you missed until it’s there again. You know why you haven’t been able to sleep much the last sweep.

When you break the kiss, you’re still holding her — your faces are close and you can see the teal flush on her cheeks. You can hear the soft whisper as she gasps for breath, her lips parted and a look on her face that you don’t think you’ve ever seen before.

“I missed you,” she says quietly. It isn’t the words she uses — it’s _how_ she uses them.

Five seconds later, she’s in your lap.

* * *

Your name is Tyzias Entykk, and you don’t remember a time before you were in love with Stelsa Sezyat.

The two of you are sprawled out on the mattress now, covered in the flimsy Empire-issued blanket that you have… and for the first time in nearly a sweep, you feel warm and happy. You’ve come to realize that maybe your life isn’t going to be the unending slog of pain that you thought it would be when you woke up this cycle. You aren’t going to go so far as to say that your life is defined by this woman, but having her in it certainly feels a lot better than not.

You drift towards sleeping with these thoughts taking up most of the space inside your head. The rest of the space is mostly devoted to how your mouth tastes like something distinctly different from — and distinctly more pleasant than — stale ash and day-old coffee. You feel drained, but in a way that’s pleasant rather than painful. Mostly, you just want to stay here for a long time and bask in this.

“You don’t have to go away again, do you?” you asked quietly — you feel Stelsa squeeze you as soon as the words leave your mouth.

“No. I’ll be in the Auditerrorizers when I’m done with this. Stationed here, most likely.”

“Good,” you mutter. You realize that if you play your cards right, you’ll be training and eventually permanently stationed on the Iustitia. You will, if you’re smart, see Stelsa Sezyat every single day. You can, as a matter of fact, share this very bed with her as long and as often as you want.

When you’re being really honest with yourself, you don’t think you’ll ever be able to change this system… either from the inside or the outside. It’s a thing so vast and so monstrous that the idea that any one person could ever destroy it is laughable. But maybe you don’t have to.

Maybe, if you’re smart, you can be there for this one person inside of that system with you. You can make life better for her — you can make sure that she stays safe. You can’t help everyone… but maybe you can help _one_ person.

Stelsa rests her head on your chest with her eyes closed.

“Zizi…” she mutters quietly. “I love you.”

This is the first time she’s said it. You’re not even sure she’s fully aware of it — fully aware of the implications of it. But you’re quite sure that she means it. You smile, and you scrunch your neck to kiss her on the top of the head, right between the horns.

“I love you too, Stels.”

Your name is Tyzias Entykk. And here, in the arms of the woman you love, you finally drift off into a deep and pleasant sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos and comments! I love kudos and comments!
> 
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